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JOHNSTOWN, Ohio — He was on his way home when the call crackled over the radio.

House fire. Possible entrapment.

Firefighter Brad Hill, who had just completed a 24-hour shift at Port Columbus, was less than a
mile from the address. He pulled up to the house at 5425 Johnstown-Utica Road N.W. yesterday
morning and saw two women standing in the driveway. One was screaming. He didn’t notice the two
children covered in soot, not at first.

Black smoke billowed from a front window.

Hill, who’s also a volunteer firefighter with Licking County’s Hartford Fire Department, radioed
in that there was indeed a fire. He grabbed his gear from his pickup truck and was suiting up when
he heard a crash.

“I took off running,” he said.

Hill, 27, of Homer, has been a firefighter for nine years. He has fought a lot of fires and
knows about a mother’s instinct to rush into a blaze to save her child. Still, it was unnerving to
see.

“There was no time to yell at her,” he said. “
Boom — the window broke, and she was gone.”

One of the women in the driveway had thrown a flowerpot into a window and climbed through to
rescue her 1-year-old, who was in a crib inside. They were both out by the time Hill reached them.
He grabbed the child, who was covered in thick black soot.

“Are you OK?” Hill asked.

“Yes,” the child said.

Still, Hill called for a medical helicopter, not knowing what the toddler might have inhaled. He
called for help for the woman, too, and for her two other children, one of whom is an infant and
the other about 2 years old.

The children went to Nationwide Children’s Hospital; the mother went to Ohio State University’s
Wexner Medical Center. Their conditions were not known yesterday, although their injuries appeared
to be minor.

The names of the family members have not been released. State fire investigators combed through
the house yesterday to try to determine what caused the fire, which appeared to be contained to a
front room. Seven departments responded to the call, and firefighters quickly knocked down the
blaze.

Hill’s father, John, the assistant chief of the Hartford volunteer department, also was
returning home from a 24-hour shift yesterday morning and arrived at the scene nearly an hour after
his son.

“I’m proud of him,” John Hill said. “He was in the right place at the right time.”